Monday, 14 December 2009

The BIG Lottery Fund has awarded just under £500,000 to ASH Scotland over the next four years to manage a research partnership with the universities of Aberdeen and Edinburgh. The aim of the project is to develop knowledge which will lead to better interventions within homes of smoking parents/carers and better health.

17 comments:

If smoking is banned in cars carrying children, how long will it be before smoking is banned in all cars, just on the off chance that a child may one day travel in them. It is now illegal to smoke in work cars even if you are on your own: presumably because the smoke somehow lingers for days or even weeks afterwards. So, yet another law which will be largely ignored. And, if members of the public report a mobile phone user, his guilt can easily be determined from his phone records; but no such records exist for smokers. I suggest all smokers drive with a foam rubber fake cigarette fixed to a ring on their fingers. That will waste some of big brother's time and energy.

I suggest all smokers drive with a foam rubber fake cigarette fixed to a ring on their fingers.

Probably be illegal to have something that looks a bit like a cigarette before long.

Here, anyone want to bet on the proportion of lottery players that smoke? I'm guessing the Lotto terminals are still at almost every ciggie counter in the country, right? So I'd have thought a fair number of regular players are people who drop a few quid on it while they're there for their weekly carton of 200. If so then is this a smart move, business wise? It seems like Penthouse giving some of the profits to a convent so they can send round a section of their fiercest anti-wanking nuns to chastise you for impure thoughts.

I don't know why in the world one wouldn't smoke in a car with kids. I've seen no research - absolutely nothing - that indicates any health effects of doing so. In fact, the baby boomer generation sat in cars while many more parents smoked than today, and they are the healthiest, longest living generation yet.

This one will go down a storm with labour's core vote - most of whom sit in front of the TV with an overflowing ashtray and a couple of kids running around. Those on the top floor of the tower blocks will have a long walk for a smoke.

While they're out there, perhaps they might take the few extra steps to the polling station where prominent 'No Smoking' signs will remind them who did this.

This bit though -

- new controls on the marketing of tobacco accessories;

This is their 'in' for Electrofag and anything like it. It also lets them control matches and lighters.

Best stock up. Lean times ahead. Although the tobacco smugglers are going to be very happy indeed.

They already do police the selling of lighters and matches in San Francisco, California, USA. It's called "tobacco paraphenelia" and if your store earns 20% or higher of sales revenues from such "tobacco related" devices (lighters, matches, ashtrays, rolling papers, etc.) then it requires you fill out a special request business license to obtain a variance to do so and come under special watch by authorities in the future, when supposedly such retailing might be banned. Meantime, retailing of any and all tobacco products is banned for any and all pharmacies within the city and county of San Francisco. And beginning next year, all businesses currently selling tobacco products, when they change ownership in the future, will be banned from retailing tobacco once ownership changes take place. In its place the city will issue no more than 500 special business licenses to allow tobacco retailing and then each year will begin drawing down the number of licenses until some point in the future will be -0-, the number of business permitted by law to sell tobacco or tobacco-related paraphenlia. San Francisco is of course home to UCSF and Stanton Glantz, with whom in the same office space sits Mitch Katz, who was appointed city medical director and who takes orders from Glantz, ASH, Big Pharma and so on, down the line, runs down to city hall and literally TELLS the mayor and rubber-stamping city-board-of-supervisors-junta what to rubber-stamp into law. If the rest of the US and UK follow the example being done in San Francisco, eventually there will be no such tobacco retailing what-so-ever in the future. I'm not sure what their reaction to electro-fag might be yet, but given the indications coming out of NJ and DC one can only imagine it won't be anything good. San Francisco unfortunately is heavily populated by a liberal-progressive-fascist majority who will stop at nothing to vilify smokers - the worst city in the world to come as a tourist if one is a smoker - the WORST.

This is an easy one for me as I don't have kids. I will just ban kids from my car and home. Seeemples

Unfortunately I am not stupid enough to think 'this won't affect me' as I realise they will be coming for me next with something along the lines of smoking in your own home can affect kids for 20 miles around type rubbish 'research'.

I am currently looking for a piece of land on a small island in the back of beyond where they can't find me.

Funny you should mention islands. Outdoor smoking has been banned on islands surrounding San Francisco, CA, USA - because like most, they are owned by the state and all state parks are smoking-banned, indoors and out, including Angel Island sitting in the middle of San Francisco Bay and the Farralon Islands 20 miles off the coast in the middle of nowhere. One can visit, one simply cannot smoke - not on the boat ride out nor outdoors on the island once you arrive there. Choose wisely the location where that island might be, because even the islands are turning smoke-banned, even out of doors, as in the city proper - "for the children" you see. I like the foam cig attached to the finger idea as that is certain to get the fingers wagging. They have even trained the children of SF to roll down the car windows while in the middle of smog-belching traffic jams and lean out to feign coughs and chokes in the direction of adjacent cars within which someone might be smoking - smog fumes not an issue of course. On the sidewalks themselves, they have some trained to behave openly belligerent and shout violent epithets as I have witnessed that also. It's most unfriendly, yet totally "normal" now.

Anonymous, I assume that is Godber saying at the WHO that using children that they injure themselves if you smoke in front of them. Some scientists are even more blatant.

" Yes, it's rotten science, but it's in a worthy cause. It will help us to get rid of cigarettes and become a smoke-free society" so said Alvan Feinstein, Yale University epidemiologist writing in Toxological Pathology in 1999 on passive smoking

The inconvenient truth is that there is not a scrap of evidence that second hand smoke (SHS) is harmful to children. Infact most studies suggest SHS is protective for future lung cancer while with asthma it is unargueably protective in contracting it in the first place.

"First of all lung cancer. There are 20 studies into LC for children exposed at home, 3 show a raised risk, 11 show it is protective and 20 are statistically insignificant.

The most (in)famous study is the 1998 WHO which came out with an RR of 0.78. "Results: ETS exposure during childhood was not associated with an increased risk of lung cancer (odds ratio [OR] for ever exposure = 0.78; 95% confidence interval [CI] = 0.64–0.96). The OR for ever exposure to spousal ETS was 1.16 (95% CI = 0.93–1.44). No clear dose–response relationship could be demonstrated for cumulative spousal ETS exposure."

On asthma in 1948 adult smoking in the UK reached its peak with 66% of the adult population and is now at 22.5%. How is that asthma and atopy have risen three fold in that time? I am aware of two studies that specifically cover atopy and both suggest having a smoking parent(s) is protective.

"Children of mothers who smoked at least 15 cigarettes a day tended to have lower odds for suffering from allergic rhino-conjunctivitis, allergic asthma, atopic eczema and food allergy, compared to children of mothers who had never smoked (ORs 0.6-0.7)

CONCLUSIONS: This study demonstrates an association between current exposure to tobacco smoke and a low risk for atopic disorders in smokersthemselves and a similar tendency in their children."

"MedWire News: Parental smoking during childhood and personal cigarette smoking in teenage and early adult life lowers the risk for allergic sensitization in those with a family history of atopy, according to the results of a study from New Zealand.... Writing in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, Robert Hancox (University of Otago, Dunedin) and colleagues explain that "the findings are consistent with the hypothesis that the immune-suppressant effects of cigarette smoke protect against atopy."

Banning smoking in cars will just increase the sales of darkened or mirrored windows. Where it used to happen with windows open, they will, in future, be firmly shut. Yep, it's the unintended consequences thing again.

Anon @ 13:23: ASH have already let it slip that they are using this as a means to ban smoking in all cars. It's in their 'manifesto'.

Angry Exile: Are there anti-wanking nuns? I reckon there are many who would quite like to be chastised by one during the act. "Keep telling me I'm a dirty old man, sister" ;-)

Eric Boyd: There is no research. They don't need it, they have brain-addled Labour MPs instead.

Bearwitch: They will find you. Parts of the arctic circle, miles from anywhere, are deemed non-smoking areas. And I'm not joking.

DaveA: Anonymous, I assume that is Godber saying at the WHO that using children that they injure themselves if you smoke in front of them. Some scientists are even more blatant.

DaveA, it is one and the same Godber. But the website scrutinizes quite a number of antismoker documents, particularly from the early years and the World Conferences on Smoking and Health. These documents clearly indicate that antismoking, by its own words, is an ideo-political crusade. There are a number of antismoking training manuals in media/politician/public manipulation through contortions of information, in working to the Godber Blueprint.

Probably not officially, but the Church seems to have a supply of women that look like a cross between Hattie Jacques and Joe Calzaghe in a habit, which really isn't a thought to have in your head while you're cracking one out.